When Rice News met Jaylen Carr ’21 at Owl Days in 2017, he was excited about Rice’s combination of academic curiosity and camaraderie.
Fast forward to his senior year: “If I had to come up with one word, to summarize my experience at Rice, it would have to be empowering,” he said. “Coming to Rice, I was existing at this intersection of multiple aspects of my identity.
“I have always had an interest in video games, and coming to Rice, I just sort of assumed that was it, it would just sort of remain something that I did on my own time,” he continued. “But it wasn't until I learned of the student-taught course program that I was able to realize that I could teach a class on something as seemingly mundane or run of the mill as ‘Super Smash Bros.’”
It was that realization that led the Seattle native to an internship at Nintendo.
“Teaching the class on ‘Smash’ led me to some insight in realizing that I had the capacity to put a spin on something that was very personally important to me,” Carr said. “And learning how to funnel energy towards the things that personally mattered the most to me.
“A lot of the subsequent opportunities that I've been seeking out either as internships or jobs through college or beyond have been in tech or in video games,” he continued.
As Carr looks back at his time in college, the academic curiosity and comradery he saw during the admissions process empowered him to be the best version of himself.
“One of the profound things about coming to Rice is that you have all these people coming from all these different walks of life,” he said. “And learning to reconcile the fact that my experience differed from a lot of those around me, be it through being a Black student or reconciling learning disabilities, was not only a difficult but also gratifying and rewarding process.”